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Category: Meetings and Exhibits

This year’s Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) (August 30 – September 2 in Boston) continues to focus on fostering scholarship in the social studies of science, technology, and medicine. Learn more about books at the forefront of this discussion, from data regulation, to reproductive justice, to people’s overall health and well-being. #4S2017

“A fascinating and wonderfully insightful account of the internet’s transformative utilization in Latin America. The rigorous sociomaterial analysis that she brings convincingly demonstrates and accounts for the co-constitution of subjects, technology, and broader social contexts and power relations.”—Lincoln Dahlberg, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Queensland

“Natasha Tusikov raises important questions about the global governance of online transactions as well as much larger questions about the relationship between public and private law enforcement in our surveillance societies. Chokepoints is a terrific book.”—Roger Brownsword, King’s College London

“Unprepared shows how, despite considerable epidemiological and biological advances, international agencies and national governments each time face similar issues, dilemmas, controversies, criticisms, and failures. It is an important contribution to the anthropology of contemporary anxieties and uncertainties.”—Didier Fassin, author of When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa

“Madeira’s interviews capture the voices of fertility patients as they struggle with decisions about whether to keep trying after repeated failures, how many embryos to implant at time, and whether to experiment with potentially risky procedures. It adds new depth to our understanding of the concept of “informed consent” and of the human capacity for decision-making in the face of often heart-breaking challenges.”—June Carbone, Robina Chair of Law, Science and Technology, University of Minnesota Law School

“Plastic Reason deftly tracks how the notion of ‘plasticity’ gathered persuasive force among a community of neuroscientists in France. Conducting and composing his ethnography through a series of conversational encounters with brain researchers, Tobias Rees elegantly illustrates how science is made in rhetoric, debate, and practice.”—Stefan Helmreich, Professor of Anthropology, MIT

“Buchbinder tellingly shows how social meanings and social life intersect in creating therapeutic approaches to pain that make it endurable as a clinical reality for patients, families, and clinicians. A serious and useful contribution to medical anthropology, to the field of chronic pain, and to a meaning-centered approach to the art of living.”—Arthur Kleinman, MD, author of The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition

It is glaringly obvious that President Donald Trump is not an ideal representative of conservative Christianity, boasting about sexual escapades, disparaging the poor and marginalized, and idolizing money and wealth. Yet, white evangelicals are among his strongest supporters. Why?One explanation is that when Mr. Trump defends and promotes conservative gender and sexual politics, he caters to and reflects an evangelical worldview.

In my research on the evangelical sex advice industry in my book, Christians under Covers: Evangelicals and Sexual Pleasure on the Internet, I find that conservative evangelicals have learned to have their cake and eat it too: they can be extremely permissive and progressive when it comes to sexual practices within monogamous heterosexual marriages, but still exclude and disparage sex in any other arrangement. In other words, the book authors, bloggers, and other website users I studied drew from secular cultural attitudes that good sex is good for you—your health, happiness, and your relationships—but still depended on their religious beliefs to create boundaries about who is allowed to have sex.

I see a similar logic unfold as family-values conservatives face a cultural quagmire. They can’t rely on many of the typical cornerstones they once used in secular debates to define “good” and “healthy” relationships. Marriage, monogamy, parenthood, and domesticity, are now visibly occupied by GLBT families. Even a President like Trump is forced into the realm of religious beliefs in order to find evidence for conservative gender and sexual politics.

Take the most recent example: A White House Memo (based on the now infamous 6:00am tweet) where President Trump declared a ban on transgender people serving in the military.

It is easy to debunk Trump’s claim that medical costs associated with transgender healthcare are burdensome: these would comprise between 0.04 and 0.13 percent of healthcare expenditures according to a RAND study. The argument that transgender soldiers may diminish unit cohesion is also weak, given that it has been used and successfully challenged as military positions became open to non-whites, women, and gays and lesbians.

The only argument left to withstand scrutiny is a religious one—where conservatives can claim that their beliefs come from God. The idea that transgender people should be managed, excluded, and outed is justified by claims of conservative Christian leaders that a binary gender order was divinely created. By emphasizing their own religious convictions, conservatives need not address other challenges to their logic.

So when a secular President like Mr. Trump tweets about conservative gender and sexuality politics, make no mistake: he is preaching to the choir of the religious right.

Kelsy Burke is Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of Nebraska – Lincoln.

Just because two sides of a story are presented does not necessarily mean the truth is somewhere in the middle. Nor does it mean there are only two sides and each side is equally balanced. Most social behaviors and attitudes exist for complex reasons. When people argue from a “two-sides-of-the-coin” perspective, we fail to realize that there are in fact multiple sides, perhaps even a continuum with viewpoints all along the way.

Humans have a tendency to dichotomize reality: male and female, life and death, religious and nonreligious, tall and short, body and soul, pro and con, Republican and Democrat. How simplistic to think of reality in such limited ways with such minimal binary conceptualizations.

As anyone who has ever watched television news knows, endless debates about controversial topics characterize cable shows. Partly due to journalistic ethics of demonstrating fairness by providing balance, viewers get to experience shouting matches and unintelligent debates among competing perspectives.

Despite engaging with alternative ideas and hearing varied views, we tend to listen selectively and employ confirmation bias in reinforcing our already-held opinions. What should be presentations of facts and scientifically-derived evidence typically turn out to be shouting contests of personal opinions. A critical thinker needs to discern these opinions, attend to the wide-range of claims and data, and decide what a fair and balanced approach to the issues should be. Not all topics require a range of positions, of course; you wouldn’t have a member of the Ku Klux Klan as a balance to someone highlighting hate crimes against ethnic and racial minorities. Or would you, as presidential comments about recent news events from Charlottesville suggest?

When engaging with news stories, research, and media reports, it’s important to critically think about the ways fairness and balance may actually be misused. Objectivity in gathering information is almost always affected by some subjective elements of those people collecting, interpreting, and disseminating the facts. Often just the choice of what to report or research is reflective of someone’s preferences and biases.

Notice also that when established views or facts are questioned by an activist group or individual protesting the status quo, media often then seek out commentary from “the other side” composed of established leaders and officials, thereby reinforcing the conventional wisdom and power positions.

Reporting of controversial events with balance may seem fair unless the language, visuals, and commentary used in introducing various positions are loaded with consciously chosen or inadvertent bias. Look for such labels as “the so-called leader” or defining the murderer as a “thug” or a “terrorist” or a “loner.” What impact do these loaded words have on the public when a claim is made in this manner?

One of the problems with balance in the media is that it can distort the proportion of opposing views. When two sides are given equal treatment, viewers might assume a 50-50 split on important topics, thereby creating a false impression. False balance occurs when “both sides” are presented despite one perspective being overwhelmingly agreed upon by scientific consensus. Research confirms that this kind of two-sided balancing creates uncertainty about the topic in the public eye. Consider that while there is 97% agreement among scientists (in published peer-reviewed articles taking a position) that human activity causes global warming and climate changes, less than half of respondents in a Pew Research study thought scientists agreed on this subject.

When the media highlight an “other side of the coin” skeptical view to balance a scientifically agreed upon position, it creates an impression that these 3% represent half of the experts. Critical thinking skills demand we look more closely at these public presentations of complex issues. Such false balance and belief in a limited binary approach perpetuates the divisions in public discourse, social policy, and presidential pronouncements. False balance and simplistic “sides of the coin” arguments are no way to address the needs of a society and its citizens seeking leadership and intelligent responses to the complexities facing us today.

Peter M. Nardi is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Pitzer College. He is the author of Doing Survey Research: A Guide to Quantitative Methods.

Trump’s administration considers “inner city” violence, drug use, and teen pregnancy to be major issues in perpetuating the cycle of poverty in black and brown communities. Those who embrace this rhetoric consider black and brown residents of this country as responsible for their own socio-economic marginalization. This rhetoric is embedded within racist ideologies that construct black and brown communities as culturally depraved. However, the assumption that various “risk behaviors” such as drug use, violence, and teen pregnancy are overwhelmingly responsible for economic marginalization of black and brown communities is regrettably not unique to the current administration.

Many progressive liberals including academics consider risk behaviors as one of the central stories of poverty, although they offer structural explanations that are vastly different than the cultural deficiency (of economically marginalized black and brown communities) arguments. Many liberals consider it important to make visible how and why poverty causes black and brown youth to become teen parents, drug users, and gang members.

While drug use and violence are arguably issues we need to tackle, they are hardly unique to economically marginalized black and brown communities. For example, rate of drug use is fairly consistent across all communities, police violence killed 991 civilians in the year 2015, and postponing pregnancy does not benefit economically marginalized women the way in benefits middle-class women. Moreover, overwhelming majority of economically marginalized black and brown U.S. Americans do not use drugs or join gangs, and they do not become teen parents.

Why then do we write about drugs, gangs, violence, and teen parenthood as the central stories of poverty? Why do government and non-profit organizations, schools, and communities focus on preventing risk behaviors among black and brown youth as the key to breaking the cycle of poverty? What are the consequences of this overwhelming focus on risk behaviors? These are some of the questions I tackle in my book The Making of A Teenage Service Class.

I spent three years among sixteen young economically marginalized black and brown youth, who denounce drugs, gangs and early parenthood, and pursue higher education and white-collar work, to find out if they are able to go beyond their families’ class positions. Their families, teachers, communities, and the youth themselves had to navigate the rhetoric that they were at risk of teen pregnancy, drugs, gangs, and violence by virtue of their membership in a particular socio-economic group. They were told that avoiding these risk behaviors should be their priority, and that should they be successful in avoiding them and pursuing higher education, they could lead the middle-class American dream. The young people were adamant on avoiding these risk behaviors, imagined that they are indeed socially mobile on counts of not engaging in risk behaviors, and stigmatized their friends, neighbors and family members who did not play by the “mobility rules.” On one hand, the young people struggled with hunger, subpar transportation, untreated illnesses, and lack of access to computers, Internet and college support programs while balancing school with minimum wage jobs. On the other hand, the community spent its resources and time in “preventing” risk behaviors.

This overwhelming focus on risk behaviors overshadows structural shortcomings and it reinforces race and class hierarchies by feeding the stereotypes that black and brown youth are at risk and that their behaviors are in need for modification. While there is a difference in how those in different ends of the political spectrum understand the causes of risk behaviors, what is dangerously similar is how risk behaviors are ubiquitously constructed as the central story of poverty around which policies ought to be built.

What we should ask ourselves—irrespective of our location on the political spectrum—is, how can we support all youth and their dreams and desires instead of focusing on risk behaviors? We know that avoiding early parenthood does not increase chances of mobility among poor black and brown youth, drug use is not unique to black and brown youth, and violence is related to mass incarceration in the U.S.—why are we preoccupied with these issues among economically marginalized black and brown youth at the cost of supporting their educational and occupational goals, and fostering larger structural changes?

Ranita Ray is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

France has been under a state of emergency since the November 2015 terrorist attacks in several sites in the Parisian metropolitan region, including the Stade de France stadium and the Bataclan theater. Originally put into place by then-President Francois Hollande, it has since been extended about six times. Current president Emmanuel Macron has proposed extending the state of emergency until November of this year—two years after the November terrorist attacks.

Why does this matter? Under the state of emergency, police officers are allowed to conduct searches without warrants, among other measures. And such measures have disproportionately affected black and North African-origin individuals. According to a recent Amnesty International Report, French authorities are increasing using emergency powers to restrict protests and demonstrations. This is the longest state of emergency in France since the Algerian War of Independence.

But France has another state of emergency – how it treats its racial and ethnic minorities. In my forthcoming book, Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France, I show how the North African second-generation is constantly treated as if they were not French even though they are, as revealed by the marginalization and racism they experience. The individuals I discuss were born and raised in France, are educated, and have achieved a middle-class status and upward mobility relative to their immigrant parents. Yet, they are still treated like second-class citizens, or denied cultural citizenship, because of they are non-white. France therefore has a growing of citizens who despite adhering to Republican ideology and doing everything “right” cannot be seen as fully French or be fully included in mainstream society. Much like second-generation Latinos in the U.S., they are continually asked, “Where are from?” and the answer, France, is never satisfactory.

Despite the defeat of Marine le Pen in the recent presidential election, racism and xenophobia have not gone away. President Macron was under controversy this past June for a joke he made about the boats that transport Comorian migrants to Mayotte, a French department off the coast of Eastern Africa. And police violence against black and North African-origin individuals is a growing problem, including the summer 2016 death of Adama Traoré in the banlieue of Beaumont-sur-Oise and the February 2017 beating and rape of Theo L in the banlieue of Aulnay-sous-Bois. Despite France’s emphasis on a cohesive national community, it remains uncomfortable and unsettled with the multicultural nature of its population.

This season of The Bachelorette introduced social class into the story line, when Eric revealed to Rachel that he had grown up in the city of Baltimore, home of The Wire. Would Eric be able to persuade Rachel that he was the one? And if so, would marriage be on the horizon? Over the past few decades there has been a growing bifurcation in marriage. People with college degrees are now considerably more likely to “jump the broom” than are couples where one or both partners lack a bachelors degree.

What is it about social class and marriage that is so inextricably linked? Shows like The Bachelorette portray marriage as an opportunity for social mobility (for women) or class closure (for men). Glossed over are the challenges differentiating the family formation opportunities of adults from more and less educated backgrounds. Americans with less than college degrees are as likely to aspire to romantic, long-term relationships as the college educated. But barriers to the success of long-term relationships are high. Housing often eats up well more than a third of their income, good paying stable jobs with benefits are hard to find, pregnancies often ensue even when not intended, and debt decreases one’s attractiveness on the partner market.

So, is a college degree now a prerequisite for marriage, along with a professional job? Data show that people with college degrees are now more likely than non-college educated people to get (and stay) married. But how does that come about? In our book, Cohabitation Nation: Gender, Class, and the Remaking of Relationships, we spent two years talking to young adult cohabitors, exploring what contributed to this growing class divide.

While two generally can live as cheaply as one, we found that the less educated frequently moved in together more quickly than they would have liked, often due to economic need rather than the intensification of their relationship. Further, pregnancies experienced early on in their relationships habitually added additional stress to the situation. And, while many women, regardless of social class, aspire to egalitarian relationships, college educated women were better able to achieve their desired end – greater sharing in household chores, and more agreement regarding important things like contraceptive use and where the relationship was heading (engagement). They are also more comfortable with asking for what they want and their college educated male partners are more amenable to sharing and communication than are less educated men. This sets middle class cohabiting couples on the road to marital success. Economic strain and dissonance in expectations and gender roles, in contrast, challenge the relationships of less educated couples, making marriage far less desirable.

While Eric win over Rachel in the end? If her goal is marriage, our results suggest that the final answer will be “No.” It’s not that the less educated eschew marriage. But the expectations of what should be in place for a marriage to occur, expressed by both women and men, increasingly puts the ability to “tie the knot” beyond the means for many of the less advantaged.

Sharon Sassler is Professor of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University.

Amanda Miller is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Indianapolis.

Congratulations to our authors for the following illustrious award wins! We are so honoredto partner with authors whose works foster a deeper understanding of our world and can change how people think, plan, and govern.

Unemployment is at a 16 year low and the stock market is booming. Yet, many Americans continue to struggle in today’s economy, and this is increasingly evident among older adults. They are working longer, often delaying retirement because they can’t afford to give up their jobs. And that’s among those who are lucky enough to be employed. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reports that complaints of age discrimination in employment are up since last year, although they are somewhat lower than during the Great Recession. Seniority no longer translates into security. Instead, older workers report being let go because they are more expensive (higher salaries and health care costs) than younger workers. Adults who continue working into old age face a rising rate of workplace injuries, which not only can result in physical and emotional suffering but also be devastating financially.

In the face of such labor force challenges, older adults may turn to families or the government for support. Unfortunately, changes unfolding in the family lives of older adults are actually likely to aggravate their economic strain. Much like their young adult counterparts, a shrinking share of older adults are married. About one third of Baby Boomers are unmarried. A generation ago, 80% would have been married. Poverty is quite unusual among married Boomers (5% are poor), but one in five single Boomers is living in poverty. Single Boomers contend with more health issues than do marrieds and at the same time they are less likely to have health insurance.

Historically, widowhood often led to poverty. Indeed, it was the impetus for Social Security. Now, gray divorce, which is a term describing divorce among adults over age 50, is affecting hundreds of thousands of older adults each year. Since 1990, the gray divorce rate has doubled while the divorce rate for young adults has fallen. Widowhood is also declining with lengthening life expectancies. Notably, gray divorce appears to be associated with harsher economic outcomes than widowhood for women. Women who experience gray divorce may have been out of the labor force for decades, making it quite difficult for them to gain employment. They are unlikely to be awarded alimony and do not receive the survivorship benefits that widows get following marital dissolution.

Social Security presumably acts as a safety net for older adults. But it is predicated on outmoded assumptions. Designed during an era of near universal, stable lifelong marriage, this program is most effective for those who follow the traditional family pathway: marry young until death do us part. This pathway is less and less common. Social Security is not an adequate safety net for many divorced women. Among those who are age-eligible for Social Security, the poverty level of gray divorced women is twice that of widowed women. Likewise, never-married older adults, women and men alike, also experience high levels of poverty akin to those of gray divorced women.

Tying economic benefits to marital status disadvantages those who don’t conform to tradition, and the non-conforming are rapidly becoming the norm. Yet, Social Security eligibility criteria haven’t budged in response. The continuously married already enjoy the most economic resources and they arguably derive the greatest benefits from Social Security. The widening economic gap between the married and unmarried is now playing out among older adults. Despite working longer, many aren’t able to escape economic hardship and governmental support is not enough to close the gap.

Susan L. Brownis Professor and Chair of Sociology and Co-Director of the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University.